Category: Leaving Locust Avenue

Leaving Locust Avenue

I thought I would take a minute here to acknowledge the shifting of my memoir title from Learning to Survive to Leaving Locust Avenue. First things first: a big THANK YOU to Caroline Litman, gifted writer and fellow Highly Commended author in the Bridport Memoir Awards. She read my book, and floated this title with me. I immediately knew it was right. So grateful to her for this stroke of insight.

Second: the title makes clear that this house is at the centre of the abuse. On this avenue. In Southwestern Virginia suburbia. It feels right and important to flag here that Child Sexual Abuse occurs everywhere and anywhere. Including within the four walls of my childhood home. My sexual abuse did not happen in some ‘deprived’ area, by parents who were ‘addicts’ or ‘on benefits’ etc etc… I make these points because, believe it or not, over the last couple of years I have had people say exactly these things: ‘oh I knew it happened in some parts of town’, and ‘oh but you are doing so well, how?’ etc. All judgments of not only me now, but the circumstances I and others grew up in. And a ridiculous, shaming attitude toward those who grew up differently. This attitude conveniently keeps CSA at arm’s length — over there, not in my backyard.

Once and for all, here it is: Child Sexual Abuse happens to at least 1 in 6 children across all socioeconomic levels. I am happy to provide the resources I and others, including dozens of charities and organisations, use to arrive at this — but I would also encourage you to look it up yourself if you have questions, as along the way you will find out a great deal about Child Sexual Abuse.

My father was a professor, as were many wage earners living along this particular avenue. And his crimes were completely hidden in this house. How many more houses along this street hid Child Sexual Abuse? Statistically speaking: several. Yes, almost certainly: several.

Third and finally, I come to my leaving Locust Avenue. It was the last thing I wanted to do, in so many ways. But I felt forced out, scapegoated (as I now know is typical in family cases of abuse) — and I had to do something to save myself. As followers of this blog will know, I had to leave behind my [half] brother and [half] sister after 11 years of living with them, and was forbidden from telling them anything. It was a terrible secret to keep. Feeling forced to leave my childhood home destroyed it for me, forever, regardless of any good times there.

So yes. Leaving Locust Avenue is right. It captures so much at the heart of this book.

Here is an excerpt from the memoir which recalls when I first arrived at Locust Avenue.

***

Ommie and Granddaddy take me to Blacksburg the first time [when I am six years old]. Ever the intermediary figures, with them I feel entirely at ease. I remember no feelings of apprehension or even distress saying goodbye to my mother. I don’t remember saying anything to her, or her words to me. I believe we drive up, taking the two days along the Natchez Trace, through Alabama and a corner of Mississippi, then up through Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina, arriving at last in deep Southwestern Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The only clue I have to the nature of the experience is that later my grandfather tells me he catches me sleep-walking on the journey. He wakes up in the middle of the night in the Best Western, and I am standing there, with my hand on the door handle of the room, about to open it. We are two floors up, and outside there is a metal railing around the rectangle of the pool in the middle. Needless to say, he leads me back to bed.

            The house on Locust Avenue, in Blacksburg Virginia, where I mostly live for the next 11 years, is medium sized. Set in a hilly suburban area, it is a single storey olive green clapboard with a steep drive up to the carport. With three bedrooms, a living room, a lounge, dining room/kitchen and two small children, until I arrive it must seem relatively spacious. There is a large flat space out back, the only flat place in the neighbourhood in fact; in later years we brave my father’s warning of killing the grass every evening in order to play kickball, softball, and ‘ghost’. It is a real neighbourhood, with at least a dozen kids of all ages in the streets, especially in summer.

            Of course, I know nothing about anything at first. I am impressed by the swings under the big tree, and remember swinging in them with a kind of aimlessness, while Ommie and Granddaddy stand close by watching.

I am impressed too by my half-brother and half-sister, six months old and two and a half, respectively. Already I have missed having siblings, and this ready-made family thrills me. I remember picking [my sister] up, and half-carrying, half-dragging her down the hallway to her room, delighted I can do it. I remember [my stepmother’s] anxiety about this action, afraid I will drop her.

            [My sister] is a beautiful child, with enormous blue eyes like Granddaddy’s, and long ash blonde hair. The photograph from close to this time shows her sitting serenely with her legs tucked out to one side, in a blue velvet dress with her hands folded neatly in front of her. Her hair is pulled back just at the crown, her widow’s peak emphasising her high forehead and her gentle, serious face. In the picture she looks vulnerable, like life has caught her unawares, and it is true that from the instant I walk into that house I feel protective of her.

             I am ashamed to admit that in all of our years together I never really consider the effect my entrance must have on her. It is only with my own two children, with the exact same age difference, that I can see how I – this vocal, eager to please, attention seeking child – might have overrun and quieted an already naturally introverted little girl. Suddenly [my sister] is the middle one, and despite the several visits to Texas I take in the first years, she remains so until I just as suddenly leave the house eleven years later.

            Both [my sister] and I, in a sense, and differently, become stranded. It is due to her quiet determination to keep in touch that we manage to communicate at all in the years after I leave the house, given what will happen.

            I imagine that for [my brother], being so young, my entrance is more seamless. My earliest memory of him is noticing his bottle propped up on the cushion of the sofa while [my stepmother] prepares dinner. I remember going over to it and holding it for him; I want someone to feed him. Is it my imagination, or does he look me in the eye then? I wonder now if my deep affection for babies begins with him, with the desire to connect.

            Physically, [my brother] too has the long face, the blue eyes of our family. He is always [my stepmother’s] baby though, and I have clear memories of him sitting on her lap, her going through his hair, looking in his ears, grooming him like a chimp grooms her little one. For many years, until recently, he and I fall entirely out of contact, which I regret. As with so much else, I feel I failed him. It was not my job to catch him when so many things seemed to fall apart, first for me, then for him; nevertheless, I wish I had been able to.

And what of my father and stepmother? They inspire in me no emotions, and I suppose at first I look at them as just the next set of grown-ups to take care of me. I am used to living elsewhere, so at first my father’s house is just another in a long line. I remember that he has black glasses and dark hair. I remember [my stepmother’s] long hair and long legs, her quiet, slow-moving ways. Her distance. My father teaches mathematical physics at Virginia Tech, and is at work most of the time. I remember a few arguments, raised voices, and going into school afraid that they will get divorced. But in the main, I remember no display of emotions either from my side or theirs, only the unspoken sense that I have to be good – I have to behave – in order to stay. And that staying is imperative. Underneath it all, beneath the daily smooth running of life, things are desperate somewhere, and I know it. And as is the way with children, I end up feeling like everything, all the ways in which this will or won’t work — everything ultimately depends on me.

generations

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother over the last few weeks. Her illnesses. Her pathology. Her recurring cries for help.

She unfortunately married an abuser. Who, over ten years after they were divorced, began to abuse me. When I think back to telling her I was abused…I wonder if then, right then, she gave up almost completely.

My aunt and I believe that my grandmother was also abused by a family member. And we are sure there are more. How my father figures into this history of abuse is not something I will ever know. I am sorry if something happened to him, in the way that I am sorry when I hear of any abuse. But it is not a consideration when I face his abuse of me. After all: I am not an abuser. My aunt (whom he also abused) is not an abuser. My mother, abused by her own father, was not an abuser.

It is a myth that victims of abuse go on to abuse. It is a dangerous and wholly inaccurate assumption, one which partly absolves perpetrators of responsibility and accountability. The truth is, abused in childhood or not: the decision to abuse is down to the abuser. It is the abuser’s fault. No one else’s.

All of the abused women in my family have tried, and mostly succeeded, to break the intergenerational line of sexual abuse. My mother’s attempt to save me from her suicidal and infanticidal actions — her more or less throwing me from her sinking boat onto the boat which appeared to be floating, my father’s — was also an attempt no doubt to save me from her abusive past, and the fear of how she might harm me. She said to me many times that giving me up was the hardest thing she had ever done, and that she was wracked with grief for over a decade afterward, until I went to university. Later, when I told her about my father’s abuse of me — all of her sacrifice must have seemed for nothing. Must have destroyed whatever she had left, on all fronts.

Two and a half years after she died, I am finally going through her things. As I’ve known for a while, this is all — somehow — my next book. The photo above is I believe her graduation photo, from high school. She went on to the University of Texas at Austin and did a double major, in English Literature and Maths. She was smart. Very, very smart. The loss of herself over her lifetime is heartbreaking. So much promise, so much life. She was 79 when she died, destitute and completely alone in a high security nursing home, trailing a number of psychiatric diagnoses. In the pandemic. Despite our years of trauma with each other, it was the thought of her dying alone which really undid me, the night I received the email.

This short excerpt from my memoir — now titled Leaving Locust Avenue — recounts when I told my mother about my father abusing me.

***

Back [at university] for my final semester, I now begin to tell everyone else in my life about my father’s abuse of me. My close friends, including Lia and Dan and Alice (two of whom, it turns out, have their own stories of abuse), and, at my therapist’s urging, my mother. The longer I hang onto this, she says, the more damage it does. The longer I protect people, the more I hurt myself.

            So. I ring my mother after that Christmas and Winter Term, back in my house at Oberlin. And, after she becomes angry at me for being in therapy ‘again’ and why am I not yet ‘over’ my early life with her, I tell her.

            She is speechless. Apoplectic. Understands now why I came to live with her [when I was 17]. Wants to know more details than I can possibly say right now. There is so much I can’t yet say.

            And soon after, within a couple of weeks, more secrets. My mother herself starts having flashbacks, and begins to remember being abused by her own father at a very young age. She tries to tell me details, but I cannot listen. I don’t want to listen. She tells me instead some of the things my father did to her – demand that she sleep with him after their divorce, when he was already remarried, nearly rape her when they were married, follow her, spy on her.

            This all makes an awful sense, but it’s a weight I cannot carry, and she clearly cannot help me. My mother and I drift apart again. She enters a downward spiral, which leads more than once to hospitalisation and psychosis, and I find that I must stay close to the people I love, and whom I know love me, the people who know right from wrong even when I can’t see it, especially of course R. By the summer after my senior year at Oberlin we are living together, and by August we are engaged, despite my mother’s protest of ‘not needing to get married’, but thankfully with Ommie and Granddaddy’s blessing.